Unlike Joseph Muscat I don’t think my time at St Aloysius College was the best of my life. Actually, it was quite the opposite and undervests were the least of my problems there. I also remember shaking the dust off my feet the last time I went anywhere near that place. It was my last day of school.

Single-sex education leaves young people clueless as to how to relate to the opposite sex

Hand on heart I’d have to say that most of it had to do with me rather than the institution itself. There was, however, at least one thing me and my fellow inmates had no control over. Let’s call it the Billy Budd extended situation.

I came to the book via Claire Denis’s 1999 film Beau Travail, an evocative adaptation in which Melville’s story is loosely re-enacted by a Foreign Legion troop based in Djibouti. Britten’s opera was next and I was hooked.

It took me very long to understand why the story so struck a chord. Now I think I do. Suffice it to say that one of the problems Britten struggled with was that Billy Budd was an all-male party. His opera would have not a single female voice and that was artistically testing.

St Aloysius College wasn’t about sailors cooped up on a man-o’-war or troopers in the desert. Still it came pretty close, functionally speaking. There wasn’t a single female in sight (I exclude teachers and sixth formers – the first were our parents’ age and the second were kept distant) and that made for some epic dysfunctionality of the non-artistic kind.

There are at least two reasons why the experiences of teenage boys and girls marooned in single-sex schools matter.

Both have to do with how these spill over into and contaminate adult life. The first reason is that single-sex education leaves young people clueless as to how to relate to the opposite sex.

I once found myself twiddling my thumbs on the beach at Santa Marija in Comino. The cabaret was provided by what I figured was a tal-Mużew bunch of the young adult type who had made the day trip from Gozo.

Things got interesting when a score of very blonde and very female language students showed up. At which point the tal-Mużew people forgot all about Manchester United’s missed chances and embarked instead on graphic perorations of ‘what they would do’ (‘x’nagħmlilha’) to the new neighbours.

Luck was on their side. Apparently drawn to the Mediterranean je ne sais quoi spread out before them, three of the foreigners made their move and attempted some sort of flirty contact. Voyeurism not being among my many faults and given what I had just overheard, I quickly decided to move my towel elsewhere.

I needn’t have worried. Tongue-tied and clueless, the tal-Mużew people had just melted into the bushes. On their part, the three pioneers were left wondering if they had stumbled on a gay beach. No words, let alone other things, were exchanged that day.

I’d argue that this little story is sympomatic of much of what goes on (or doesn’t) between young men and women. Things seem to function on the forbidden fruit model. Intimacy, even when rampant, is seldom thought of as a perfectly normal part of life. Happens I suppose when girls and boys are kept apart and brought up on a diet of tosh.

For example I clearly remember priests telling us that we should respect women, wherever we might chance across them in the distant future. The highest form of respect was to make sure we first married those we wished to sleep with. To do otherwise was to ‘use’ them.

I have no way of telling if my schoolmates were as gullible as myself. All I know is that it took me years of unlearning before I began to suspect that nerve endings were not a male prerogative.

Astonishingly, it seemed some women thought sex wasn’t entirely objectionable. ‘Using’ could go either way and, rather more usefully, so could pleasure.

In part, the misinformation had to do with the condition of our sages. Not that I have any issue with celibacy itself: I respect the choice of so many nuns and priests and I can also see the point, within the context of religion. But I also think it’s not such a good idea to leave the education of teenagers to celibate people.

Be that as it may, our cluelessness also had to do with the fact that we had no way of testing the ground for ourselves. Separating boys and girls just at the moment when they need to learn to live together is a mad and bizarre idea. It produces generations of twisted men and women for whom the respectable Maltese word for sex is ‘is-sex’ and who think that ‘condom’ is a rude word.

The second problem has to do with (not) taking women seriously. (Obviously works differently, but equally effectively, the other way round.) When one grows up in a culture which separates the sexes during the crucial teenage years, one tends to exoticise the opposite sex as some kind of distinct species that inhabits a distant world of its own.

It has often struck me, for example, that most Maltese men think of women as goddesses, of the heavenly or domestic type. This may sound wonderfully virtuous but it rather makes for a brutal and sweeping chauvinism that consistently fails to take women seriously – unless they’re haloed virgins or doing the floors, that is. Most of us are simply not trained to see them as normal human beings.

It would be simplistic to put it all down to single-sex schooling. The point remains however that separating teenage boys and girls assumes that life is made up of two irreconcilable and fundamentally different worlds.

By all means go for co-ed, Evarist Bartolo. Go directly there, do not pass the ‘experimental’ stage and do not collect results. It’s actually single-sex that is such a mad experiment, and the data are not encouraging.

mafalzon@hotmail.com